A Conversation with Venture Capitalist Daniel Egger--

A Conversation with Venture Capitalist Daniel Egger(1)

2007-05-17 13:46:03 [ Big Normal Small ] 　Comment

Rui Wang(left), Daniel Egger(middle) and Xing Zong(right)

About Daniel Egger:

Daniel is the Founder and Chairman of Open Source Risk Management, Inc., to which he brings more than fifteen years of commercial software development, risk management, and finance experience. Daniel’s career as an entrepreneur began in 1992, when he founded Libertech, a venture-backed search technology company, to commercialize algorithms he had developed and patented while doing graduate work in statistics and mathematical modeling. After selling Libertech in 1997, he joined Eno River Capital, an early-stage venture capital fund based in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, where he is Managing Partner.

Seven years ago Daniel founded what is now one of the best-known Business Plan competitions in the United States, the Babcock Elevator Competition at Wake Forest University, in which students have two minutes to present their plan while riding twenty floors in an elevator with venture capitalist judges.

Daniel has served as an organizer, lead investor, Board Member, and interim CEO for more than a dozen venture-backed technology startups. Five years ago Digital South Magazine named him one of its “Heroes of Southern Technology”.

Daniel is a graduate of Yale University and the Yale Law School, and clerked for Sr. Judge William Bryant of the United States District Court in Washington, DC. He is currently an adjunct Assistant Professor, and the first Howard Johnson Foundation Entrepreneur-in-Residence, at Duke University.

Recently, Xing Zong and Rui Wang, both Ph.D. students from Duke University had an interesting conversation with Mr. Daniel Egger.

Xing Zong: Mr. Egger, your education background arouses my interest: course work in math, then Yale Law School for a J.D. degree, after graduation you started a technology company. When did you begin to combine law training and technology interest together?

Egger: When I was in college, I was always struck by the fact that the worlds of science and technology on the one hand, and the humanities on the other, are so separate. Most people are so much just in one world or the other. My father had been a physics student, and then he became a neurophysiologist and taught in medical school. My mother was a comparative literature person – Beowulf, Virgil, Dante, the Icelandic Sagas. So I grew up with both in the house. I have always been interested in both. I considered the separation artificial.

I have always been interested in looking at problems from the outside – from the point of view of some other body of knowledge. How would a person in the humanities understand what is going on in the history of science? How would a statistician understand the common law tradition? I was lucky that at Yale Law School, you are allowed to take several courses outside the formal Law School curriculum for full credit. I was allowed to take a course in statistics, and another in mathematical modeling for economists. I was taking the courses for fun. And it occurred to me that you could dramatically improve computerized legal research by applying mathematical algorithms to the graph – the network of hyperlinks – in a collection of case law or other legal documents. It is the kind of insight you only have if you are working across disciplines. Really ever since then — that was in 1991 – I have tried to find projects where I can bridge the gap between very technical, mathematical, and more social, humanistic knowledge domains. I looked for interdisciplinary projects and I found some wonderful things to do.

Rui Wang: I guess your action was ahead of fashion at that time when most of your friends didn’t realize how important information technology would become.

Egger: Yeah, they did not understand what I was doing at all. My classmates were polite, but I’m sure some thought I was crazy, quite frankly. I had worked for the Dean of the Law School, Guido Calabresi, as a Research Assistant, I had clerked for a federal judge in Washington D.C. So I had all the proper credentials for a more conventional career path, and then I said, “I am going off to start a software company.” It would be like saying, “I am going to row across the Pacific.” It made no sense to people.

Now, fifteen years later, with the emergence of the Internet and the use of information technology in all disciplines, people understand more now. “Oh, now I see why…” but at that time, many just thought I was crazy. But Guido Calabresi and William Bryant – my mentors -- both supported my decision fully – and for that I’ll always be grateful.

Rui Wang: I will give you another interesting example, this year a new Ph.D. student came to our program, which is computational biology. Guess what? He was already an assistant professor at Duke law school!

Egger: Oh, really? That’s someone I should talk to! (Smile)

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